The long gestation of a sculpture
Sam Robinson reveals the haunting story behind a work of art
My works usually begin with a very strong emotion, often one of sadness calling to be expressed,” says Sam Robinson.
And yet, the time he spends making a work can be one of intense joy.
The Hamilton sculptor is one of 45 artists whose work is on show in Building Cultural Legacies at You Me Gallery. The exhibition features local artists who were active from the 1970s to about 2000.
Robinson, an influential, founding member of Hamilton Artists Inc. in 1975, has two pieces in the show.
“Laughing Canela,” a life-size sculpture, invites us to look down on a dead dog lying on its back. Canela, Robinson says, was the name of a real dog.
“My sculpture does not refer to the dog’s laughter, but appealed to me as a dramatic and mysterious name for the sculpture.”
Robinson let the creative mental process take its time, but the actual making was relatively short and sweet.
“Laughing Canela fermented or rotted in my imagination for 10 years before I made it in one well-remembered day of intense, joyful, fevered creativity,” Robinson says. “The details of construction and the esthetics of the sculpture on that day were entirely spontaneous.
“The making of the sculpture took place over about eight hours, during which the passing time absolutely disappeared. Upon completion, I remember being astounded that any time at all had passed.”
Robinson chose his materials carefully. He wanted, he says, “to suggest layers of severely damaged flesh and skin.”
So, he took pieces of old plywood “some of it ripped with my bare hands,” and layered them with wood he salvaged from a toboggan and some fibreglass infused with resin. The layered pieces blur the boundaries between seeing a disintegrating body and an abstracted highly textured form.
“Making sculptures begins long before the physical act takes place,” he says. “The sculpture has to somehow hold together and in order to stand up it usually needs an armature, a skeleton. It requires some crucial mechanical considerations. Some of my sculptures have collapsed under their own weight very close to completion of the work.
“Sometimes one chooses to obscure the skeleton. In ‘Laughing Canela,’ I definitely did not want to obscure anything.”
The sculpture was inspired by an event that happened in 1971 when Robinson lived among the Wayuu people along the Caribbean coast of South America. He was a graduate student in cultural anthropology at McMaster University.
“I had the opportunity to take a course in fieldwork practice, the basis of ethnographic research,” he says. “I lived in the homestead of a mother and her children. The oldest, a teenage boy, Remijio, hunted birds with bow and arrow accompanied by his beloved dog, Canela. In the midst of the fairly uproarious wedding of two very elderly people on the top of a high sandy hill, Remijio pointed far below to Canela, lying dead in the middle of a dry river bed.
“What haunted me over the years was Remijio’s laughter as he showed me Canela’s carcass, being eaten by vultures. The ways that males, in particular, transmute their responses of suffering into faux humour has fascinated me since I was a kid.”
For “Chair #6” Robinson took parts of a discarded chair and reassembled them into an abstracted form characterized by straight and curved, joined and separated lines.
“I think the chair sculptures were the last sculptures I made. One of them was sold, much to my surprise,” he says. “I am definitely not a prolific sculptor. I think that I’ve made about 15 or so sculptures in my life, and sold only two. Selling is the last thing on my mind.”
He turned his talents to writing, publishing a book of short stories three years ago.
But he is ready to be a sculptor again. One of his sculptural ideas has been gestating for several years.
“It just took a huge leap last week.”
Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator, YouTube video maker and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art.